Violinist Pekka Kuusisto | Photo: Christian Michelides
Who is Pekka Kuusisto?
Pekka Kuusisto is a Finnish violinist and conductor, known as much for his charm, eccentricity and enthusiasm for one-off boundary-crossing projects, as he is for his depth of musicianship.
- Watch: Thomas Gould performs a programme for The Cusp during lockdown fusing Telemann with Nico Muhly
Where was he born?
He was born in Espoo, Finland, just west of Helsinki, in October 1976.
Was his family musical?
Yes! Pekka Kuusisto comes from a dynasty of musicians. His father is Ilkka Kuusisto, a jazz musician and opera composer. His mother was a music teacher. His grandfather, Taneli Kuusisto, was a composer and organist and his elder brother, who died of a brain tumour in 2022, was the violinist Jaakko Kuusisto.
What was his training?
Although Kuusisto trained in classical violin playing – his mother oversaw his practice sessions – a lot of his early lessons in musicianship came from his father, who encouraged him to improvise. From a young age, Kuusisto would sit at a keyboard with his brother and father. “We’d take a jazz song, and one of us would play the harmony and melody, another would play the bass line while the third would play an improvised solo,” Then we’d swap places.” said Kuusisto in an interview with the FT. That knack for improvisation burrowed its way into his violin playing and by six, Pekka Kuusisto had already played his first jazz gig. He went on to train at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki.
What kind of music does he play?
What doesn’t he play? In addition to the warhorses of the repertoire, and contemporary classical music, Kuusisto continues to play with electronic and jazz bands. He loves folk music, and, in 2016, made classical music headlines with his Proms debut at the Royal Albert Hall, which he concluded by getting the audience to sing along to a Finnish folk song. “A good folk song is universal,” he once told me. “nobody has any weapons against the impact of that kind of thing.” But it’s probably in his unclassifiable projects, which often straddle multiple genres, that he is most at home.
Such as?
The most recent was DSCH, a multimedia meditation on the life of the 20th century Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, in which Kuusisto and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra took on various character roles and costume changes while wading their way though several Shostakovich instrumental works: at times they were refugees; at time they were circus performers. There was no obvious narrative but the aim was to provide a dreamlike take on Shostakovich’s music, that avoided the cliche of spotlighting Shostakovich’s tensions with the KGB.
Elsewhere, Kuusisto has striven to engage with topical issues. In a recital he gave at Wigmore Hall six years ago, he combined Bach’s music and contemporary works with readings from a cancer research scientist and footage from an operating theatre, the aim being to help us “get used to looking at [images of cancer] and talking about it.” In 2019, he also made Elegy for the Forest, a film in collaboration with Greenpeace, which aimed to build awareness of deforestation.
Where can I next expect to hear him?
You can hear him direct a programme of Barber, Schoenberg, Varese and Prokofiev at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg on September 28.